Living with Theory (review)

“The message of Living with Theory is that theory is not what it used to be,” writes Vincent Leitch in the opening line of his latest book (1). Coming from Leitch, general editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001), and author of Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (1982), American Literary Criticism From the Thirties to the Eighties (1989), Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (1992), Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows (1996), and Theory Matters (2003), this message should not be taken lightly. Few authors have been as astutely observant of the course of theory over the past twenty-five years as Leitch.

Gone is the aestheticism, stylistic analysis, ahistoricism, and search for patterns and archetypes that typified theory in the 1970s. Today, reports Leitch, they have been replaced with a whole new field of considerations and fresh areas of inquiry. Theory is now used to examine and account for everything from the rise of the corporate university and nature of the culture wars to free market economics and the attenuation of the welfare state. Moreover, it continues to concern itself with issues of multiculturalism, globalization, and postmodernism, both as concepts in themselves and as applied to an understanding of literature and culture at large. Notes Leitch, theory “has an expansive thriving present and a promising future” (1).

Leitch clearly relishes theory’s new era, and “does not long for or personally miss” the previous one. However, the contemporary postmodern era of theory lacks the organization of the previous era. Contemporary theory is, in Leitch’s words, a “highly disorganized field,” particularly “in the context of today’s literary and cultural studies” (2). Though perhaps an arid time, the heyday of high theory in the 1970s was at least a relatively organized one that distilled into a relatively limited number of critical approaches or methods: psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, reader-response, structuralist and semiotic, poststructuralist, feminist, and Marxist. These approaches, in turn, could be linked to identifiable theses, concepts, and figures.

Still, as the twentieth-century drew to a close, new historicism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and other areas of critical concentration began to complicate the field of theory. These emerging fields offered new possibilities for theoretical interventions and brought an increasing level of complexity to and interest in theory. Now, says Leitch, we have “body studies, disability studies, whiteness studies, media studies, indigenous studies, narrative studies, porn studies, performance studies, working-class studies, popular culture studies, trauma studies, and so on” (9). Today, with so many fields and sub-fields—and meadows and valleys—its not surprising that few aside from Leitch seem to have a handle on the field, and even fewer are gutsy enough to claim to offer a “map” of it. If nothing else, theory is indeed not what it used to be. What, then, is it?

For one thing, it is not dead. For Leitch, “to mourn theory is to assume a certain stance toward as well as a definition of it” (11). “If theory means poststructuralism(s) or all contemporary movements and schools or postmodern discourse, then we can project a historical passing, an end” (11). However, contends Leitch, this definition of theory is one choice among a number possible conceptions of theory, most of which clearly reveal theory to be alive and well. For example, if by “theory” one means “the gamut of contemporary schools and movements, plus their offshoots in cultural studies” (9) or “a toolbox of flexible, useful, and contingent devices and concepts, judged for their productivity and innovation” (10), then theory is alive and flourishing.

Leitch believes that rather than fretting about whether theory has ended (cases can be made for either side) a better question is “Where in the schools and universities of the future will literary and cultural theory be housed and studied?” (12). I agree with Leitch that this question is perhaps “the main question today”—and for comparatists, perhaps the most significant one addressed in the book.

It is no secret that comparative literature departments...